This website is dedicated to Oncology Biomarker discussion.
To submit a conference announcement on Cancer Biomarkers or other topics relevant to oncology, please send an email to alex@pnano.com and we will post it here.

Tuesday, October 20, 2015

Cancer Research Funding And Major Questions

In my previous posts I have extensively reviewed about the importance of personalised medicine and companies which offers these services on commercial basis. This blog piece is intended for the health care professionals, academicians, students and post doctoral researchers to check about various opportunities in the field of cancer medicine and biology.

Identification of New Essential Genes In Human Genome
A study was published recently in science magazine by collaborating efforts of MIT, Broad institute, Harvard Medical School and Whitehead Institute provided insight into bacterial clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) system to screen for genes required for proliferation and survival in human cancer cell. Their efforts identified 300 genes most of them located in nucleolus that were previously uncharacterised. And most of the genes consists of domains associated to RNA processing. This study may play an important role in identification of novel potential drug targets for various cancers. Their results suggested the use of CRISPR-based screens and a general strategy for identifying liabilities in cancer cells.

Recently, Cancer Research UK has announced £100 million for answering most important questions in the field of cancer medicine and biology. More details about this funding opportunity can be seen here.